With nearly 870 million people chronically undernourished, and progress towards the Hunger Millennium Development Goal ebbing since 2008, feeding the world will continue to be a major global challenge. The limitations of arable land availability, water accessibility, and humanity’s increasing population trajectory further compound the problem. Addressing the challenges to global food security while ensuring the sustainability of the planet will require changes to the way we interact with agriculture and a clear understanding of the driving factors behind it.

Food and Energy Price Volatility

The industrialisation of agriculture over the last five decades has contributed to massive gains in productivity, but it has also made food increasingly susceptible to energy supply and price fluctuations. Energy in the form of oil and gas is needed to run industrial farm equipment and to ship food around the world. Fertilizers, the driving factor behind most yield increases, are intimately tied to energy and therefore price volatility. Nitrogen fertilizers are particularly significant and are created through a process that combines natural gas and inert nitrogen from the atmosphere in a high-energy reaction to create ammonia. Fertilizer production is estimated to account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture (Woods, et al 2010). While shale gas has had a significant impact on the US natural gas market, globally, energy prices are expected to rise in the long term and become increasingly volatile, as shown by the graph to the right. Fertilizer costs will follow a similar trend, leading to variability in cost and availability. This can be especially difficult for small farmers in developing countries, whose resilience to price fluctuations is low.

Locking Ourselves In to Volatility

Natural means of increasing agricultural yields are possible through recycling manures and planting crops that add nutrients to the soil. However, barring a radical change in agricultural practices, globally we are locked into chemical fertilizer use, especially nitrogen fertilizers in the short and medium term. Approximately 45 per cent of the world’s food supply is grown using chemical fertilizers, and that number is growing. Meat consumption, which requires large amounts of grain for animal feed, is on the rise. Consumption of animal protein in Europe and the United states together is double the world average (FAO 2006), and is expected to grow 10 per cent between 2005 and 2030. However, demand in developing countries for animal proteins is projected to increase 60 per cent in the same period (Reay 2011). Pressure from biofuel legislation in Europe and the United States puts further pressure on land and drives up global food prices.

Global land deals have increased dramatically in the last ten years, with an area of land eight times the size of the UK sold off globally in that time (Geary 2012). In addition to causing landlessness and poverty for local communities, the land is often used to grow large areas of single-species crops such as soy or eucalyptus, which use industrial agricultural methods requiring a high amount of chemical fertilizer, thus increasing dependence on global energy markets and locking new land into fertilizer dependence. Furthermore, nutrients and pesticides can make their way into local water supplies, degrading the environment upon which local communities depend. For example, water contamination from agricultural runoff can force communities to buy bottled or trucked water at higher prices, reducing their resilience to price fluctuations even further.

Fertilizer as a Means of Reducing Poverty

But fertilizers are not evil. Increasing yields (either through better access to fertilizers or implementing natural yield improvement practices) can greatly impact poverty and inequality. There are many regions of the world in which more nutrients are urgently needed in order to ensure the land is not degraded. When fertilizer is introduced to degraded soils, it can have enormous trickle down effects for poverty reduction, health, and education. In the early stages of development, when a country is primarily agrarian, the most consistently effective methods to reduce poverty and improve equality involve the agriculture sector, particularly through methods that raise small farm productivity (Berry 2010, Deininger and Byerlee 2011). For example, a recent review of coffee grower data from Mexico and Peru, published in the World Development journal, found that increasing yields are most important for growers (Barham and Weber 2011).

Nitrogen: The Missing Link

So where does that leave us? The very thing that reduces poverty and hunger through increasing yields can cause insecurity through energy price volatility. Add increasing pressure from consumption choices, land degradation, population pressure and climate change and we have a situation of increasing food insecurity globally.

There is no silver bullet answer to this conundrum. However, the solution will likely be a combination of improving the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use and increasing the productivity and adoption of natural methods. Cross-cutting all of these solutions is the main driver of yields: nitrogen. Phosphorous and potash are also important elements of fertilizer, but nitrogen is the nutrient needed in the largest quantities. Just as a basic knowledge of how CO₂ impacts climate change is important for developing solutions to the problem, so is knowledge of nitrogen important for developing solutions to food security.

Nitrogen is critical for all plants and animals to grow. Some plants build it naturally into the soil through a symbiotic process between bacteria and their roots called ‘biological nitrogen fixation’ (beans and clover, for example), but the majority comes from chemical fertilizers and as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.

For those that remember the nitrogen cycle from science class, we know that 78.1% of the atmosphere is inert nitrogen (N₂). In the 20^th century, we developed a way to convert this inert, atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen accessible to plants and animals (known as “reactive nitrogen”). This has enabled food production to roughly keep pace with the explosion of population growth over the last fifty years. Whether through fertilizers or biological fixation, nitrogen will play a key role in meeting the food needs of the future.

When there is not enough nitrogen in the soil, loss of soil productivity and degradation occur. Because it is small farmers that often lack access to nitrogen, their yields decline year over year, reducing their annual income and thus exacerbating inequality within the global food system. This pushes them further into poverty, and in many cases can force them to purchase food when they cannot grow enough. Degraded land forces them to go in search of new, more fertile land, breaking apart families and communities.

However, the solution is not as easy as simply adding more nitrogen in areas where there is not enough. Too much nitrogen can cause serious problems for human health and the environment. While nitrogen is required by plants in order to grow, there is a limit to how much any plant can use. Beyond this “critical load”, nutrients that cannot be absorbed by plants will leach into the water and air. Once in the environment, nitrogen can change forms over an extremely long life (average of 120 years) and detrimentally affect many different systems before finally becoming denitrified back into atmosphere. Nitrogen exacerbates climate change, depletes the ozone layer and drives biodiversity loss. It causes low-oxygen zones in water systems that weaken or kill fish and marine habitats (known as eutrophication or hypoxia). Reactive nitrogen can also be very detrimental to human health through air and water contamination. It is a major contributor to smog, which is estimated to take six months off the life expectancy of over half the population in Europe (Sutton et al 2011). It is even worse in areas like China, where the density of air particulates have registered at twice the level considered “dangerous” in metropolitan centres like Beijing. Ingesting high levels of water-borne nitrates has been associated with cancer, diabetes and adverse reproductive outcomes (Ward et al. 2005).

The graph below shows nitrogen fertilizer application globally. In the red areas of the graph, many of the main water bodies suffer the detrimental effects of too much nitrogen, and the people that live in those areas suffer as a result of nitrogen pollution. Many of the green areas could benefit from more nitrogen to increase soil productivity.

The key is balance. On the one hand, improving the efficiency of fertilizer use will maintain crop yields while protecting the ecosystems humans and animals depend upon. On the other hand, developing biological nitrogen fixation methods or pro-poor fertilizer programmes to increase yields for small farmers will improve their situation economically and strengthen their resilience to price shocks and weather events. In both cases, proper nitrogen management will be a crucial part of solving our global hunger crisis while ensuring sustainability for future generations.

Lisa Dittmar is the CEO and founder of NitrogenWise,  a website that brings together research and straightforward communication to explain the complexities of nitrogen in a meaningful and relevant way.

Citations

Barham, B. L., & Weber, J. G. (2011). The Economic Sustainability of Certified Coffee: Recent Evidence from Mexico and Peru. World Development, 1269-1279.

Berry, A. (2010). What type of global governance would best lower world poverty and inequality? In J. Clapp, & R. Wilkinson, Global Governance, Poverty and Inequality (pp. 46-68). London: Routledge.

Deininger, K., & Byerlee, D. (2011). Rising global interest in farmland. Washington DC: World Bank. Retrieved November 30, 2012, from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/Resources/ESW_Sept7_final_final.pdf

FAO. (2006). Livestock Report 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Geary, K. (2012). Our Land, Our Lives: Time out on the global land rush. Oxford: Oxfam. Retrieved November 2, 2012, from http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bn-land-lives-freeze-041012-en_1.pdf

Reay, D. S. (2011). Societal choice and communicating the European nitrogen challenge. In M. Sutton, The European Nitrogen Assessment (pp. 585-602). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sutton, M. (2011). Too much of a good thing. Nature, 472, 159-161

Ward, M. (2005). Workgroup report: Drinking-water nitrate and health-recent findings and research needs. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113, 1607-1614

Woods, J., Williams, A., Hughes, J. K., Black, M., & Murphy, R. (2010). Energy and the food system. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2991-3006

Front page image source: Organic Fertiliser for sugar cane – Shell

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines food security as “all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. However, due to a complex range of interconnected issues from climate change to misguided economic policies, political failure and social marginalisation, over 2 billion people across the world live in constant food Insecurity. It is important to take a sustainable security approach to look at the importance of “physical and economic access to basic food” by exploring the links between food insecurity and violence.

A recent article published by the journal Conflict, Security & Development examines food riots as representations of insecurity and looks at the relationship between contentious politics and human security.

Thomas O’Brien, author of the article, argues “the upheaval caused by a food riot can lead to lasting instability and violence as social and political structures are challenged”. Global rises in basic food prices triggered demonstrations and often violent protests in “over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in 2007-08”. The article puts recent food riots and the current global food crisis in historical perspective. Food riots are about more than “just access to food”.  They represent dissatisfaction with political structures and perceived injustices.

It is important to note that “the extreme nature of the rise in food price in the absence of much evidence of food shortages, left a sense of something unnatural about the way food markets were working”. Although poverty, weak states, ineffective civil society and lack of political freedom all contribute to food insecurity and the possibility of violent food riots, we cannot ignore to challenge underlying transnational and global power structures: “146 protests in 39 countries over the 1976-92 period were linked to the imposition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies.” Food security is fundamental to human security and needs to be approached by addressing underlying causes and drivers. A sustainable response to food insecurity would take global cooperation, justice and equity as key requirements.

An often mentioned driver of food insecurity is climate change. Climate change already has a great impact on global security concerns and the physical, social and economic effects will undoubtedly only be exacerbated in the near future. Increasingly high temperatures and little or inconsistent rainfall have devastating effects on crop yields in places such as India, Africa’s Sahel region and the mid-western United States.

The catastrophic food crisis in Niger in 2005 for example was largely attributed to the effects of climate change and competition over limited resources. Years of too little and too inconsistent rainfall have meant devastating droughts and diminishing harvests in this Sahel country of west Africa which has the highest birth rate in the world. Increasingly advanced desertification due to climate change means competition and potentially violent conflict, over limited resources such as water and arable land, intensifies.

In the 2005 food crisis however, although thousands of children died of malnourishment, Niger had produced enough food to feed its population. The real issue was a food shortage in neighbouring Nigeria. Nigeria has an economy based primarily on oil exports with a significantly weakened agricultural sector. Instead of Niger feeding its own population, much of the harvest was sold to wealthier Nigeria at prices much higher than anyone in Niger could have afforded. This is a good example of why free market economy and trade liberalisation do not necessarily benefit all parties involved. Writing about the great famines of the last century, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted “a drought is natural but famine is man-made”. What this tells us is that although the challenges we face by climate change are serious threats, there is much that can be done to ensure more food security through political and economic policies.

Farmers in Niger are struggling. But so are farmers in Jamaica. In contrast to Niger, Jamaica has a wealth of fruit, vegetables, fish and an abundance of fertile land. About one fifth of this island’s population is employed in the agricultural sector. Still, farmers are struggling to survive because they cannot compete with the much lower prices of subsidised agricultural imports from the USA. As cheap foreign products flood the market, Jamaican prices are driven down which makes local food production by and large unprofitable. As they rely more on foreign food imports, Jamaicans will be increasingly vulnerable to price volatility on the global marketplace. With the average Jamaican spending about half of household income on food, such vulnerability to price changes is a real danger to food security.

Importing less foreign food products is a difficult matter for Jamaica because of the strict trade liberalisation policies imposed on the country through its debt relief agreements. One could also argue that if it is cheaper for Jamaica to import food than to produce its own, why should it still encourage its local agricultural sector? When a country is dependent on food imports, it cannot assure food security for its population.

So far US imports have been much cheaper than local Jamaican produce. 2012 however has seen the “worst US drought in 50 years” according to last month’s Aljazeera article entitled Food riots predicted over US crop failure. “Grain prices have skyrocketed and concerns abound the resulting higher food prices will hit the world’s poor the hardest- sparking violent demonstration” says the newspaper. Corn is a primary staple in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and prices have already gone up 60 per cent since June because “the United States accounts for 39 per cent of global trade in corn and stockpiles are now down 48 per cent” due to the drought.

Price fluctuations on the global food market do not affect all people in the same way as “people in wealthy industrialised countries spend between 10 to 20 per cent of their income on food. Those in the developing world pay up to 80 per cent. According to Oxfam, a one per cent jump in the price of food results in 16 million more people crashing into poverty.”

A sustainable approach to food security would address underlying forces such as climate change, economic and political policies and social marginalisation.

Paul Rogers, expert on global conflict and consultant to the Oxford Research Group on global security, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth. When asked whether free markets can help feed us, he replied:

“It will contribute in some way, but I think it is fairly minimal. There are far more important things to consider. Look at it this way: Back in the world food crisis in the early 1970s, which was the worst for about 80 years, there were about 450 million people malnourished.  Now the figure is closer to 800 million. Now, that malnourishment and lack of food is not generally because there isn’t enough food to go around. Even at the height of that crisis there was still half the normal reserve. It is because people cannot afford to get the food or to buy the food. […]  If you are looking at the situation of poor people across the majority world, there has to be some way in which we can actually improve the production of food in and around those areas to provide greater resilience in the face of what is coming because beyond all of this is the whole issue of climate change. I think we will have a wakeup call this year in terms of what might come.”

Anna Alissa Hitzemann is a  Peaceworker with Quaker Peace and Social Witness. She currently works with Oxford Research Group as a Project Officer for the Sustainable Security Programme, with a focus on our ‘Marginalisation of the Majority World’ project.

Author’s note: This article is a shorter version of a journal article published in the Annual Review of Political Science, 2017. A shorter version of this piece can be read at the Monkey Cage.

There is a new trend currently underway in the way civil wars are conducted. Dubbed the “new new” civil wars, these conflicts are a source of serious concern for several reasons.

Something new is happening in the world of civil wars.  After declining in the 1990s, the number of active civil wars has significantly increased since 2003.  Over the past thirteen years, large-scale civil wars have broken out in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, Chad, Mali, the Central African Republic and Ukraine, while new civil wars threaten to break out in Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon.

Post-2003 civil wars are different from previous civil wars in three striking ways. First, most of them are situated in Muslim majority countries.  Second, a majority of the rebel groups fighting these wars espouse radical Islamist ideas and goals.  Third, of the radical groups fighting these wars, most are pursuing transnational rather than national aims.  These three patterns are striking and suggest that we are in the midst of a new wave of civil wars that we do not fully understand.

In a new article, “The New New Civil Wars”, I argue that these trends are the result of a new and evolving information and communication (ICT) environment.  We now live in a world where citizens and elites operate in an interactive Internet environment, where anyone with a smartphone can easily produce and disseminate material from almost anywhere on the globe.

The role of the evolving ICT environment

Image credit: Voice of America News/Wikimedia.

Instantaneous, global communication is likely to have at least six major implications for civil wars. First, information technology is likely to benefit individual citizens (especially citizens in highly repressive countries) more than political elites in those countries.  Dictators and autocrats will face greater difficulty limiting and controlling the flow of information and the messages their citizens receive. Government elites will also have greater difficulty preventing individuals from coordinating their protest activity.  Citizens are likely to be better informed about the behavior of government officials, the well being of their particular ethnic or sectarian group relative to other groups, and the level and extent of dissatisfaction in society.  The result could be a boon for popular demonstrations and grass roots organizing.

Second, global Internet campaigns are likely to make it more feasible for rebel groups to form, leading to civil wars with a greater number of warring factions. It used to be that rebel entrepreneurs required a base of local support and financing to make mobilization possible. The Internet has changed this.  Internet media campaigns make it easier for rebel entrepreneurs, especially those with limited local backing, to solicit the soldiers and financing necessary to start a war. This is likely to lead to greater external involvement in civil wars and a larger number of warring factions. The evidence seems to support this: the average number of rebel groups fighting in civil wars has increased over time. In 1950 the average number or rebel groups in civil wars was 8; in 2010 it was 14.

Third, the new information environment also means that rebel groups are likely to have greater incentives to frame their objectives in global terms, something we have observed with the proliferation of Salafi-Jihadist groups.  First, the Internet allows warring factions to be more ambitious, ignore international borders, and set their sights on affecting large-scale change by drawing on the resources of a globalized world.  Second, the Internet is likely to reward groups such as al Qaida and ISIS with global aims, since they will have a wider audience from which to generate revenue and recruits.  Thus, the new information environment has shifted the advantage from homegrown groups with local bases of support to transnational groups with global networks and connections.

Fourth, the Internet is likely to make it possible for rebel groups to sustain themselves longer in war.  The decentralized nature of the Internet means that rebel groups will be less dependent on a single source of income or a single patron. If they lose access to one source of income (i.e., coca) or one patron (i.e., Iran), they still have access to millions of potential individual donors.

Fifth, the Internet is likely to make the spread of civil war more likely. Research has found the civil wars produce a contagion effect (see here, here, and here); once one civil war breaks out, it increases the risk that civil war breaks out in neighboring countries.  One of the implications of a Web 2.0 world is that ideas and ideology are likely to spread more rapidly and more widely.  This occurs in two ways.  The first is directly through the dissemination of information via the web, and the second is indirectly through the recruitment of foreign soldiers.  ISIS and al Qaida, for example, use Internet propaganda to recruit foreign fighters from around the world.  These fighters then receive indoctrination and training, and eventually return home, creating new networks in their native countries.

Finally, the Internet could potentially eliminate the restraints rebel and government leaders have to target local citizens with abuse.  Studies have found that rebel groups that are reliant on the local population for support or financing are less likely to commit human rights violations.  Conversely, rebel groups that receive significant material support from external patrons are more likely to use violence toward civilians.  Rebel groups in the current civil wars appear to be following this pattern.  In Iraq, ISIS and the al-Mahdi Army both enjoyed significant external financing and all have been significantly more likely to target civilians with violence than groups that did not.  By freeing combatants from the need to solicit local support, the Internet may also be freeing them to engage in more civilian abuse.

The drivers behind these “new new” civil wars in Muslim countries

So why has there been a rise in civil wars in Muslim countries, fought by multiple Islamist groups, many seeking transnational aims?  Globally-oriented groups such as al Qa’ida and ISIS formed and prospered in countries that had previously been some of the most information-poor countries of the world.  It was in these countries where the new-found flow of information allowed for an opening for individuals to organize, for rebel groups to link to other groups, and for human capital and war financing to begin to flow.

Combatants in Muslim countries were also quick to figure out how to exploit ICT to their advantage. They discovered that framing their movement based on an identity that was large (Sunni), wealthy (oil-rich), and ideologically extreme (Salafi-Jihadist) allowed them to utilize the web in ways that brought in more money and recruits than had previously been possible. In fact, the trans-border nature of both the Sunni population and Persian Gulf financing was tailor-made for the Internet age.

This does not mean that other groups in other regions of the world will not learn how to exploit the advantages of ICT.  My guess is that any group with a large number of international kin (especially wealthy kin) will pursue similar strategies.  Sunnis are leading the way because the benefits of a Web 2.0 world have been easiest for them to tap, but others will follow.

Conclusion

The “new new” wars” are characterized by the rise of rebel groups pursuing extreme ideologies, a rise in the number of transnational actors involved in these wars, and the use of goals and strategies directed at global rather than local audiences. These trends are a precursor to a series of changes that are likely to be seen as actors civil war adapt to a new and evolving ICT environment.

Whilst this piece has outlined the importance of the evolving ICT environment in these “new new” civil wars and theorized about why we are observing the wars in predominantly Muslim countries, much more work needs to be done on this phenomenon.

Looking forward, a major challenge for scholars and analysts will be to understand the full range of implications that emerging technologies will have on every aspect of civil war and to decipher which groups are most likely to harness this technology, when they are likely to do so, and the conditions under which these new strategies are more or less likely to succeed.

It is not known exactly how this third wave of civil wars will evolve and which additional groups and countries will best exploit these advances. There is also uncertainty regarding which strategies will turn out to be the most successful and how these strategies are likely to change over time. Nevertheless, what we do know is that the internet will play a bigger, not smaller role, in every decision that is made. Ultimately, gaining a more comprehensive understanding of these “new new” wars be a crucial research enterprise in the future.

Barbara F. Walter is Professor of Political Science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego. She is an authority on international security, with an emphasis on civil wars, terrorism, and unconventional violence. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, and held post docs at Harvard University and Columbia University. Walter is on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and World Politics. She is also the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Guggenheim, and Smith Richardson Foundations.

Often seen as a tactic harnessed by the weak, guerrilla warfare can also be a employed by the strong. States have at times used guerrillas in inter-state and civil conflict.

Guerrilla warfare is widely viewed as a weapon of the weak. To Mao Tse-tung, it was the optimum strategy of those “inferior in arms and military equipment.” He drew inspiration from the Russian troops accomplishing, in 1812, what their militarily superior European counterparts could not: drive Napoleon’s Grand Army out of their country. They did this not only by taking advantage of Russia’s distinctive geography and climate, but also by using guerrillas – Cossacks and peasants – to go after the French troops “as unconsciously as dogs bite to death a rabid stray dog.”

But, guerrilla warfare can also be a weapon of the strong. States with robust conventional military capabilities at times use guerrillas in inter-state and civil conflict.

Guerrilla Warfare

Image by kurdishstruggle via Flickr.

Guerrillas’ advantages stem from their organization and local ties. They typically operate as small, independent units, thereby exercising more maneuverability, alertness, concealment, and access to the local population than their regular counterparts. Carl von Clausewitz recommended supplementing a regular army with bands of armed civilians. He observed that, when faced with adversity, soldiers typically “cling together like a herd of cattle,” while civilians “scatter and vanish in all directions, without requiring a special plan.” But, he emphasized that the latter should not be used “to pulverize the core but to nibble at the shell and around the edges” of regular armies.

Both Clausewitz and Mao viewed guerrillas as useful for weakening a conventionally strong rival through harassment and psychological warfare, but recognized that they are “but one step in the total war.” It is the regular troops that must, in the end, directly confront and defeat the enemy. Thus, for example, the recent U.S. strategy of sponsoring local rebels in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s (Russia-supported) army was likely to fail not least because of the difficulties inherent in using nonstate proxies. The U.S. strategists – presumed students of Clausewitz – failed to recognize the necessary role of the regular forces, or else significantly underestimated their capacity to form a regular army out of irregulars while in the midst of a war. Or, they were simply constrained by the political unfeasibility of setting regular U.S. soldiers’ boots on the ground.

In addition to weakening (or hopelessly trying to defeat) a rival’s regular forces, states often use guerrillas – or “counter-guerrillas” – against guerrilla rivals. The latter are typically rebels fighting to gain, maintain, or reclaim territorial control from an established government or occupying power. The former are sometimes also referred to as “pro-government militias.”

In a recent article published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, I closely examine and disaggregate the different types of counter-guerrillas states use in counterinsurgency operations. I identify two types of counter-guerrillas: self-defense militias and death squads. Self-defense militias typically comprise ordinary civilians, such as peasants, while death squads are usually manned by experienced militants, such as turned rebels or violent criminals.

I argue that states make proxy choices based on the latter’s comparative advantage, availability, and controllability. The state’s ideal partners are highly skilled fighters with deep knowledge of the insurgent network and links to the local population. Regular soldiers are highly skilled fighters, but possess limited local and insurgent knowledge. Partnering with nonstate actors means tackling the classic principal-agent problem, and the state’s capacity to do so is significantly shaped by its spatial reach (i.e. territorial control) across the theater of war. Figure 1 illustrates the different configurations of territorial control.

Figure 1. Zones of Control

In Zone A, the state exercises full control. Zone B represents the insurgent-dominated area, whereas Zone C is the contested region where both sides actively compete for influence. Zone D represents an area that has been largely neglected in the burgeoning civil war literature. It is a zone that is neither fully controlled nor, for the time being, actively contested.

Among the nonstate alternatives, the ideal partner for the state is a skilled fighter with insider knowledge of the insurgency and its logistics network. The disadvantage of using this type of proxy is that his fighting skills make him dangerous and difficult to control. The cost of losing control of skilled fighters can be unpalatably high. Unless they are weak or collapsed, modern states will prefer to use skilled fighters when and where they can supervise them.

Nonstate actors that possess the desired local knowledge and have significant experience wielding extra-institutional violence, whether of criminal or rebel nature, may be harnessed to counter the insurgents. Their comparative advantage is in performing specialized, offensive, and highly targeted tasks (e.g. assassinations) that take advantage of their high mobility and combat skills. Consequently, they are likely to be used where the insurgents are actually located (Zones B and C). We should expect them in Zone C, where the state can exercise control over their activities. Using death squads in Zone B requires the state to create robust control mechanisms, such as embedding these groups firmly within special operations units of regular military or police forces. Where the state exercises full control (Zone A), or where the insurgents are not yet present (Zone D), states do not require highly targeted offensive operations and, consequently, death squads.

While the comparative advantage of death squads is in highly targeted offensive operations, self-defense militias are best at performing static defensive tasks, such as guarding villages, communication lines, transportation networks, and vital installations. They are, consequently, more likely to be used to facilitate the operation of state forces in contested regions (Zone C) or to deny the insurgency access to areas where neither side has effective control (Zone D). In Zone B, self-defense militias are helpless against the insurgents. Not only can their government-provided weapons easily fall into rebel hands, but also, given the high rates of defection in insurgent-dominated areas, they may become a fertile source of rebel recruits. Remnants of self-defense militias (once created in Zone C or D) may persist in Zone A, but only because demobilization of nonstate actors is usually slow and costly.

The Kashmir Case

India’s use of counter-guerrillas in Kashmir illustrates the logic of the argument. In response to an insurgency breaking out in the late 1980s in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (here referred to as “Kashmir”), the Indian army used former rebels (i.e. “renegades”) and villagers to combat the insurgents. Initial efforts relied on local police enforcement, treating the insurgency as an issue of “law and order.” However, the local policemen proved ineffective and were supplemented by three paramilitary forces (the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police). The Indian army’s role expanded further in 1993 with the introduction of the Rashtriya Rifles, an elite army unit created specifically for counterinsurgency operations.

Former rebels were used mostly in the contested areas (Zone C) and, under the supervision of the Rashtriya Rifles, in Zone B. Kashmiri ex-insurgents, who were also popularly known as “Ikhwanis,” were used to eliminate rebels and their sympathizers. In Zone D – the mountainous areas of the Jammu region – the state instituted the civilian-manned Village Defense Committee (VDC) system. Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of the “renegades” and the VDCs. Official statements place the number of VDC volunteers at 6,000, but a prominent Kashmiri journalist I interviewed in Srinagar (the summer capital of Kashmir) estimated the figure to be closer to 23,000.

Figure 2. Zones of Control in Kashmir

Costs of Counter-Guerrillas

Counter-guerrillas may be good for war, but they are bad for peace. Weaponizing turned rebels, criminals, and civilians offers tempting tactical benefits, but it also carries significant post-conflict costs. The conventional wisdom is that outsourcing violence lowers the cost of conflict and provides states with plausible deniability. However, as I learned from my fieldwork in Kashmir and other conflict zones, the local population quickly becomes aware of the illicit links between the counter-guerrillas and the government, as does the international community.

The “renegades” may have helped the Indian army achieve military victory over the insurgents, but they also significantly boosted the widespread and enduring resentment against the Indian government. The arming of a select ethnic group (mostly Hindus and some Sikhs) in Jammu generated “intermittent outburst of communal violence” as well as incidents of looting, abduction, and rape.

Playing local groups against one another is a classic strategy of colonialism, with a lasting impact on the peace and prosperity of many postcolonial states. Perhaps India’s Supreme Court said it best. It described the arming of over 6,000 young men in the tribal tracts by the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh to fight the Naxalite-Maoist insurgents as “tantamount to sowing of suicide pills that could divide and destroy society.”

Yelena Biberman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College and Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

This week marks the 69^th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, still the only two cases of nuclear weapons use. On these dates each year the media reminds the wider public about the destructive power of these inhumane weapons. The ‘humanitarian dimension’ initiative highlighting the consequences of nuclear weapons is evolving and consolidating itself in the non-proliferation regime. It has been shining a bright and constant light on the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons use – whether accidental or deliberate – at multilateral fora on nuclear weapons policy since the last Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference (RevCon) in 2010.

The initiative has held two international conferences, hosted by Norway and Mexico, addressing issues relating to the impact, consequence management, and risks of nuclear weapons detonation (March 2013 in Oslo and February 2014 in Nayarit). At these conferences, the powerful testimony of the hibakusha (Japanese witnesses to nuclear bombing) served as a solemn reminder of the physical and psychological long-term effects for these survivors.

The five nuclear weapons states (NWS or P5) under the NPT – China, France, Russia, UK and US – boycotted the first two of these international conferences. The third international Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons will be held in Vienna on 8-9 December 2014. Below are five reasons why the P5 should consider participating in some capacity in the Vienna conference.

1. To improve atmospherics before the 2015 NPT RevCon

The P5 have a vested interest in a smooth and “successful” 2015 NPT RevCon, to be convened at the UN in New York next May. After all, the NPT has conveniently served their security interests by limiting horizontal nuclear proliferation whilst designating them as the only recognized NWS. As various non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) stressed at the April-May 2014 NPT Preparatory Committee (PrepCom), patience is running incredibly thin with the NWS and the credibility of the regime is in question. Some states starkly warned that a roll-over of the 2010 NPT RevCon Action Plan will not be acceptable at the 2015 NPT RevCon.

So the pressure lies heavily on the P5 to engage – or at least to show a willingness to engage – more genuinely with the demands of the NNWS towards addressing disarmament commitments. One simple way to improve atmospherics in the regime would be engagement and participation in the Vienna conference by at least some of the NWS. The most detrimental behavior to the regime would be a repeat of the cartel-like approach to decision-making on participation at the Vienna conference by the P5. Such P5 solidarity, as was evidenced in bloc P5 decision-making vis-à-vis the Oslo conference would almost certainly have negative implications for the 2015 NPT RevCon.

2. To encourage NNWS to affirm humanitarian concern as a non-proliferation pledge

The active reaffirmations of abhorrence and concern with the catastrophic consequences of nuclear use by NNWS are of positive benefit as commitments both to disarmament and non-proliferation. These formal declarations and affirmations by states parties in the NPT review process and in the UN General Assembly can serve as confidence-building measures. Such declaratory statements could be construed to be affirmations akin to the Iranian fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. Such formal statements in multilateral diplomatic fora could indeed serve to confirm the declaratory views of states in regard to nuclear weapons.

3. To engage the non-NPT nuclear-armed states

Given the cross-regional and cross-grouping support for the humanitarian initiative within both the NPT review process and the broader non-proliferation and disarmament regime, the initiative could help to forge new dialogue channels for the regime. As evidenced by India and Pakistan’s participation in the Oslo and Nayarit conferences, such fora, separate from the NPT review process, can include engagement of nuclear-armed non-NPT states on issues and dialogue relating to nuclear weapons in the broader non-proliferation and disarmament regime.

Given the continued deadlock at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva, processes such as these conferences can circumvent the current stalemate in the CD and facilitate dialogue on these salient issues away from the formal confines and political stages of Geneva and New York.

4. To showcase consequence-management capabilities

The five NPT NWS could contribute to the humanitarian impact discussions at the initiative’s conferences by sharing their technical research and insight on emergency and disaster response preparedness and capacity. Then again, these states may find it difficult to participate in conferences which may lead to uncomfortable conclusions about the inability of states or any institution to address the consequences of nuclear use and the associated risks of possession and use. Whilst considering participation options at the earlier international conferences, some NWS apparently suggested narrowing the conference agenda to addressing the consequence management of limited/small-scale nuclear exchanges.

5. To engage the initiative and attempt to shape the discourse and pathway

If the P5 wish to shape the discourse and the future aims and agenda of an evolving initiative with increasing momentum and sophistication, they could do so more effectively by participating in its non-binding, non-consensus-reaching international conferences. Not to do so is to miss an opportunity to steer the initiative in or at a more comfortable direction or pace. Whether the momentum and aims of the initiative are now beyond “a point of no return” and heading towards a ban treaty, could be the reality the NWS face.

One thing is certain, dismissing the initiative and trying to discredit its activities as “diverting” from the P5 step-by-step process will only antagonize those NPT states parties already frustrated by the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament commitments. This would surely make the 2015 NPT RevCon more challenging for all parties.

Jenny Nielsen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Previously, she was a Research Analyst with the Non-proliferation and Disarmament Programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a Programme Manager for the Defence & Security Programme at Wilton Park, and a Research Assistant for the Mountbatten Centre for International Studies (MCIS) at the University of Southampton, where she co-edited the 2004-2012 editions of the NPT Briefing Book.

Featured Image: Aftermath of the 6 August 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Source: Wikipedia

Western states are growing increasingly reliant on private military and security companies. Fully understanding the privatization of security and its effects on sustainable security requires the inclusion of a critical gender lens.

Introduction

In 1999, the American private military contractor Dyncorp hired Kathryn Bolkovac as UN International Police Task Force monitor in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the course of her work Bolkovac raised allegations that private contractors and UN employees were trafficking and sexually exploiting young girls. In 2002, a UK court acknowledged that Bolkovac was wrongfully dismissed for bringing the story to light, but nobody was ever prosecuted for the alleged sex trafficking.

Bolkovac’s story — dramatized in the movie The Whistleblower  — captures perfectly some of the challenges to accountability when security functions are outsourced to the private sector and performed by transnational security forces. Security privatization reduces transparency and accountability in ways that exacerbate and make less visible the gender inequalities and gender-based violence that pervade militarized security contexts. Moreover, security privatization increases the profitability of insecurities, making it more difficult to tackle the causes, including gendered causes, of insecurity. Understanding the privatization of security and its effects on sustainable security requires the inclusion of a critical gender lens.

PMSCs and gender: an emerging challenge

Image by chuck holton via Flickr.

Over the past three decades a new challenge to sustainable security has emerged: the growing reliance on private military and security companies (PMSCs) by Western states, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and transnational corporations. PMSCs offer a wide range of services from logistical support, intelligence, training, armed and unarmed guarding and protection, to reconstruction and more. The US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that today waging war is contingent on heavy involvement from the private sector. Private contractor numbers have trailed and at times outpaced US troop levels in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In February 2010, the US DoD employed more than 100,000 private contractors each in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A number of high-profile cases have highlighted the problems associated with the use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Private contractors were involved in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the 2007 shooting and killing of Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square. Allegations of war crimes, poor working conditions, sexual harassment and human trafficking, and disregard for local populations have come to shape the public image of the private security industry over the past two decades.

In this context, gender has become part of the industry’s attempts to improve its reputation. Gender considerations have made it into the voluntary International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers that came into effect in November 2010. The International Code of Conduct explicitly addresses gender in three paragraphs on gender-based violence, selection of personnel, and harassment-free work environments. Gender has also been declared ‘good for business‘ by the private security industry. Female employees of PMSCs are seen as useful to conduct security checks on women or to foster positive interactions with local populations, and thus seen as instrumental to operational effectiveness. This attention to gender, while positive on the surface, has mostly served the purpose of creating greater legitimacy for the industry. It has not addressed the larger impacts that outsourcing have on women’s claims to greater and equal participation in the military sphere and the gendered impacts of the use of private forces in local contexts.

A critical gender lens on private security

Gender is not just a ‘problem to be solved’ for private contractors, but is fundamental to the reorganization of force through privatization, to the functioning of the private security industry, and to how the industry legitimizes itself. The greater use of private force is part of the broader neoliberal transformation of militarized citizenship that has also entailed a shift from conscription to all-volunteer forces in many Western states. This reorganization of public force has meant an end to the male citizen-soldier model and the greater integration of women into all-volunteer forces. The greater reliance on private security has occurred alongside to the greater integration of women into Western public militaries. While some decry the feminization of public militaries, others have shown how PMSCs actively rely on hyper-masculinity in portraying themselves as more effective security forces vis-a-vis the public sector.

PMSCs that provide security services primarily recruit from the army and special forces. In doing so, they replicate and even reinforce the gendered division of labour present in the public military sphere. However, PMSCs have also made a concerted effort to distance themselves from the hyper-masculine images of trigger-happy burly ‘cowboys’ and shift towards a softer and more legitimate image of masculinity, shedding the hyper-masculine militarized image for one emphasizing humanitarianism, protection, professionalism, and expertise. At the same time, privatization sidelines and depoliticizes questions of gender equality in the military sphere. There is neither publicly available data on women in the private security industry nor public debate on their marginalization within the industry. By its very logic, profitability drives the private security sector and not questions of citizenship and equal participation.

Gender also intersects with race and citizenship to shape the division of labour in the globally operating private security sector. A large segment of the workers hired or subcontracted by PMSCs comes from the Global South. The globally operating private security industry can be thought of as a hierarchy of masculinities. Western contractors are at the top of this hierarchy, and so-called third-country nationals (TCNs) from the Global South sit at the bottom. Profitability is in part achieved through the exploitation of this vulnerable migrant labour force.

The outsourcing of military security functions to private companies has allowed a global rescaling of labour recruitment in support of Western military operations. As data from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show, a majority of contractor labour is made up by ‘third-country’ and host-country nationals and not by US citizens. For example, of the more than 200,000 DoD contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan in February 2010 (mentioned above), less than 40,000 were US citizens. The racialized hierarchy among contractors of different citizenship is evident not only in pay and working conditions, but also in the kind of work performed. While local and migrant workers perform much of the logistical support work, their proportion is particularly high when it comes to the more dangerous armed security work.

Conclusion

Simply bringing consideration of gender into the private security industry is not a sufficient enough means of addressing the problems that security privatization poses for sustainable security. Conflict is often justified and waged by appealing to gendered notions of security: masculinized protectors and defenders, and feminized and vulnerable populations in need of protection. Private actors feed into this gendered discourse, portray themselves as masculinized protectors, and benefit from continuing insecurities and global inequalities. As insecurities create new market opportunities for the private security industry, gendered discourses of protection and gendered divisions of labour are being reinforced while sustainable security becomes more elusive. We need to be mindful of security privatization and the fundamental ways in which it is gendered as we work towards remaking security in more sustainable ways.

Maya Eichler is Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Community Engagement and Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.